The main feature is Unicode/UTF-8 support. Queries and data are UTF-8 now. Regexes support Unicode.

Termination status of command pipes is now processed and turned into an exception.

There are bugfixes, and internal improvements.

A new hash table type is provided internally but not yet put to any use.

The (obj_t *) value/reference type now can hold character and integer values right inside the pointer. The low two bits are used as a tag. Thus operations which manipulate the CHR and NUM types no longer have the overhead of consing up memory and generating garbage. Txr runs quite a bit faster as a result, depending on the kind of query.